Overheard

by Chris McCann

Kyle Cleveland

Your car won’t start in Council Bluffs and it just turned cold, November like a whisper you overhear through the thin walls of light.

Could snow soon, they say, but you know how they are, with their wrenches and their twisted saplings.

They think they can fix the things the world ignores. You turn the key again, again, but you’re not scared of fires,

even in summer when the smoke curls up from under doors, slinking into houses like boys out too late, late alcoholic

words poured out for nothing. The man next door keeps an arsenal of guns strapped tight to his body. They found

him in the parking lot waiting until the police came and bathed him in the light he’d been looking for. And still the engine

turns. If you could just get across the Missouri into Omaha, things might be different. But things aren’t different, not

now, and maybe not ever. When the boy whispers into your ear, don’t lie to him. We’re all alone here now

in Council Bluffs. The stars will never apologize to you for all their burning, and why should they?

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Chris McCann’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Moss, Arc Poetry Magazine, Kissing Dynamite, Salt Hill Journal, Interstellar Literary Review, Noctua Review, The Shore, and the Bodies anthology from Beaver Magazine. He lives on Bainbridge Island in Washington.